The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 4 - Little Teeth

At first, it was just the bruising. But then, sometimes, Laurent was so weak and tired that to even look upon him caused me great distress. If he had not drunk for some days, his skin would take on a greyish cast, and pull tightly over him, in that way which is so familiar to me now. His veins would stand out upon his skin, popped up as if he were being continually squeezed, and in his eyes would a faraway look, very round and lost-looking in his face. Whenever it happened, his features seemed larger and his angles cut with greater severity. The mode then of teasing the hair tall only enhanced this. He looked like a painted corpse. But, at first, it was only temporary, and he would go out again, and come back looking as fresh and white as the inside of a lily.

Whenever he came back, skin pearly and lips flushed, he would come to my bed to look in upon me. He was happier, less brittle of mood when he had drunk of blood, and more himself. "On your side," he might say to me, "take off your robe." It comforted him to be with me after the many hands of anonymous men. If I tried to talk to him about what he was doing, he would threaten me on account of loneliness, and intimate that the penalty for lecturing him would result in my isolation, which terrified me. He said, "Our guest wishes me to bed only with him, and I have been considering it, and such a decision," he whispered, stroking the new and sensitive tissue of my neck, "you should not like to push me during."

And so I learned what they had been whispering about, and the lovers' words they had been saying to each other. What a dangerous tool to titillate with! I withdrew, and even in moments when I felt completely lucid, it disturbed me. Any affection my injury had aroused in Laurent disappeared at any show of anger in me, as is nearly always the case regarding me with any of his lovers. It was not quite spite on his part, because he has always been too driven by impulse to think much of spite. My heart called. I flung myself into work.

I went often to the Tuileries, as I always had, admiring of the flowers of high summer, their walks, their shapes, their many voices gruff and earnest. I walked, breathing of the thick air, with my hat under my arm. Occasionally, a young man on a similar stroll might take that arm, and I might let him alone, and discuss light matters with him in the dim evening. At other times, he might take me behind some vanity or another, a small Greek altar, a statue of the Madonna, and think to have me for my body or my purse, and I might bite him or let him have either. Whether it were passion or violence, I liked to hear their words, and to feel their hands upon me, such that it occasionally brought me to tears, and when they left me I felt lonely for their strange fingers and threatening whispers.

It was coming back from one such dalliance that I found Laurent in my bed for the first time in some ten days. I froze in the doorway, hat in my hands, transfixed by the delicate paleness of him against my gray coverlet, before grabbing him by the wrist and viciously escorting him from the room. He protested, clawing at my arm and saying words I couldn't hear. He sounded like a startled hen, wrenched from her nest and her eggs. He squawked and bawled.

"You're mad!" he shouted, "mad!" over and over, "What are you doing this for?" scratching at me with his fingernails. He was in a brocade dressing gown and I felt his hand go for his sword as we passed it, pushing him into the sitting room. I caught his wrist and spat on the floor. He went to his knees in my grasp, and I saw then that he was terrified of me.

"You would run me through?" I demanded, feeling his wrist turn in my hand as he continued to try to get loose. I could feel the bones inside, like a bird's, and the steady fluttering of his heart.

"Child, you do not look like yourself, you do not look like yourself," he said, wiping his face with his free hand. "Who is this creature? Of passion? En coulere?"

"Come up off the floor."

"Unhand me. You forgot yourself. You will lower your voice," he sputtered, very quiet.